list addition methods compared.

[Nick Coghlan]

Steven Bethard wrote:
> (1) I didn't see the top of this thread, but I'm assuming that you've 
> got a conditional or something in your real loop or you could just use 
> lst.extend(items) without ever iterating over the items list.  Your real 
> code may actually require extend-style functionality, but as the results 
> above show, if you really only have one item to add, list.append is 
> definitely the better way to go.

Just to prove Steven's point about avoiding the for loop if you can (timings 
here use the same timeit command as Steven did):

"extend.add(items)"
10 loops, best of 3: 469 msec per loop

"extend.iadd(items)"
100 loops, best of 3: 6.88 msec per loop

"extend.extend(items)"
100 loops, best of 3: 8.77 msec per loop

"extend.extend_ext(items)"
100 loops, best of 3: 6.56 msec per loop

"extend.append(items)"
100 loops, best of 3: 3.68 msec per loop

"extend.extend_no_loop(items)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 82.3 usec per loop


The definition of 'extend_no_loop' is:

def extend_no_loop(items):
   lst = []
   lst.extend(items)

Note that if you do have a conditional expression in the for loop (e.g. "only 
add items greater than zero", it is worth checking the timings for calling 
extend with a generator expression or list comprehension that filters out the 
values you don't want)

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at email.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------
             http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net